A classic tube. A time when men led from the pulpit.
You'll never see that again. Today's preachers are more interested in keeping their tax exempt status than they are speaking truth against the government.
It's always amazed me how the so-called Christians of this nation sat on their hands and allowed the government to muzzle their leadership.
#10. To: Hayek Fan, echo5sierra, Artisan, X-15, christine, all (#9)
As soon as he went after FDR, it was game, set, match for Coughlin. This is how he ended his days.
In 1934, Coughlin formed the National Union for Social Justice to combat communism and to fight for currency inflation and government control of big business. In 1936 Coughlin, determined to stop Roosevelt's re-election, made the National Union the nucleus for the Union party, which also amalgamated much of the followings of the late Huey Long and of Francis E. Townsend, a crusader for old-age pensions. Roosevelt was overwhelmingly re-elected, while the Union party's candidate polled less than 900,000 votes.
After 1936, Coughlin's influence declined rapidly. He organized the Christian Front to succeed the National Union and trained his oratorical guns on Roosevelt's foreign policy, which he believed would inevitably involve the country in another war. He also concentrated on the fancied internal menaces of Communists and Jews (who seemed interchangeable in Coughlin's thinking). Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, he announced, were bulwarks against "Jewish- Communist" power in Europe. Coughlin enunciated a program for an anti-Semitic, fascist-style corporate state, under which established political institutions in the United States would virtually disappear.
Coughlin's anti-Roosevelt oratory became more shrill when World War II broke out in Europe in 1939 and the administration provided more and more assistance to the Allied governments. In 1940, the larger stations in Coughlin's radio network, acting on the basis of a recent National Association of Broadcasters ruling barring "controversial" speakers, refused to renew his broadcasting contract. When he continued his attacks on the government after Pearl Harbor, his bishop officially silenced him and the Post Office Department banned his weekly newspaper from the mail.
With his newsletter banned, his radio network gone, and his bishop silencing him, Coughlin confined his activities to those of an ordinary parish priest, in 1942. He retired from his pastorate at the Shrine of the Little Flower in 1966. He concerned himself with his newly-built home in Birmingham, Michigan, and still wrote pamphlets denouncing Communism.
Coughlin died on October 27, 1979 at his home in suburban Detroit. He was remembered as the fiery, vibrant, and opinionated priest who followed the directive of his church over his own feelings towards the government. Near his death, Coughlin said he "couldn't take back much of what [he] had said and did in the old days when people still listened to [him]."